Sandals scraped against stone as someone approached along the dry tunnel ahead. He raised the blades, but some primitive instinct warned him not to fight. Wit, for once, might bring victory, just as he had discovered the secret way into this lair. Kratos backed off and tucked himself from ankle to neck into a shallow stony niche lined with empty shelves. Other such niches pocked the chamber’s walls, but most of those had shelves stocked with objects. It seemed a fair guess that whoever came would fetch the items in storage and thus not even bother to look at a niche they knew to be empty.
And if he was wrong, he still had the blades. They would find this particular cabinet fully stocked with swift and bloody death.
Two men entered. One, a crookback, led the other, an old man who wore a filthy rag tied across his eyes. They began selecting items from nooks and crannies. The crookback laded the blind man with two boxes for every one of his own.
“My back is breaking from the load,” the crookback complained. “Carry another for me, will you?”
“I can hardly stand, Jurr, but go and pile it on. We daren’t make two trips. We cannot be late or Queen Medusa will punish us both.”
“Again,” Jurr said. “Once a day is more than I can bear. My back festers from the beatings she gives me.” He stacked several more heavy boxes onto the other’s considerable load while keeping only a pair of light ones for himself.
Kratos watched as they left, the blind man crushed by his load while the crookback showed a sprightlier stride. Kratos cared nothing for this. Clearly there were two sorts of people in this underground maze: those who did all the work, and those who could see. Being one of the latter made Kratos disinclined to disrupt the arrangement.
The only sound Kratos made when he followed was the faint squish of water squeezing from his sandals. As he went, he scratched trail markers in the luminescent moss. If he succeeded, he might have to find his own way out of here. Maybe Aphrodite would just snatch him back to Athens, but maybe he was required to return to where she had deposited him originally. He had never lost by preparing against betrayal.
Especially by gods.
“BRING MY MEAL, you disgusting vermin!”
This was a new voice, coming from a chamber ahead, where a lamp held back the gloom. Kratos stopped and pressed himself into the shadows outside the archway. Though the voice had been low and rough, like rocks being shaken in a brass jug, he caught some hint of inflection that told him the speaker might be female.
If he was right, a careless glance would doom him to an eternity as a stone statue, taunted by Gorgons in this twilight perdition.
The sighted man, Jurr, replied, “At once, Lady Medusa. I have brought the supplies.”
“You?” the blind man began. “I brought the—”
“Shh.”
“Shut your vile human mouths and get to work! My sisters and I grow hungrier by the moment. And angrier.” Her voice took on a dangerous edge. “It puts me in the mood for punishment.”
“Ohhh,” the blind man whined under his breath. “Oh, Zeus strike me dead before she touches me once more!”
“At least you can’t see, you lucky bastard,” Jurr snarled back just as softly. “Those mirrors, those accursed mirrors in her bedroom! Every way she turns, she can see her hideous self.”
Clanking of pots and the sounds of a fire being stoked lured Kratos into a quick look. He flicked a glance swifter than a blink, but he took in the entire kitchen. The blind man decanted some kind of jugged meat into a bathtub-size cauldron, while Jurr built the cooking fire beneath it. It looked as if the Queen of the Gorgons favored spring lamb….
No, those weren’t lambs, Kratos realized, as a cold knot formed in his belly.
They were human infants.
Kratos balled his fists, wanting to strike out at such horrific fare. Children. Human children like his own daughter, his dear daughter, who—
He stepped out but forced himself back into hiding until the proper moment. His rage mounted at the cannibalistic meal, feeding his need to destroy the Gorgons. Taking Medusa’s head had been decreed by Aphrodite—he would take grim pleasure in it, command from a goddess or not!
Shortly, the blind man loaded a huge trencher full of steaming baby stew and shuffled off toward a darkened archway across the small kitchen. Jurr watched him go, then cat-footed over to the vast kettle, snatched a ladle, and dipped a scoop, holding it up to his nose to capture the aroma. “That old blind bastard is finally learning to cook,” Jurr muttered, bringing the ladle to his lips. But before he could taste the baby stew, an enormous hand seized the back of his neck and yanked him into the air.
He dropped the ladle into the tureen and tried to yell, but the hand around his neck crushed his voice down to a squeak. He struggled, kicking his legs and clawing at the hand, but the ash-white skin seemed harder than bronze. He found himself, a moment later, turned so that he was face-to-face with the Ghost of Sparta.
His eyes went wider and rounder, and a strangled croak worked its way up between Kratos’s fingers.
“Medusa,” Kratos whispered. “Where? Just point. Point and I’ll let you go.”
Through frantic waving of his hands, Jurr managed to indicate that the bedchamber of the Queen of the Gorgons was the first door to the right along the darkened hall. Kratos nodded.
One quick squeeze crushed Jurr’s voice box, so that he couldn’t scream and so that Kratos wouldn’t have to listen to any pathetic begging. Kratos lifted this baby chef above the bath-size cauldron of boiling stew and then, true to his word, let him go.
Kratos knew that he was most in danger in the first instant of entering the Gorgon queen’s chamber. If he mistook the real Medusa for one of the reflections and found himself looking upon her face, he wouldn’t get a second chance.
Fortune favors the bold, he thought, and charged.
With a pantherish leap, Kratos sprang through the opposite archway, reaching the door to Medusa’s chamber only an instant behind the blind man. The blind man balanced the trencher unsteadily on one hand while he opened the door with the other. Hearing Kratos behind him, the blind man half turned. “Jurr—” was all he had time to say before Kratos snatched the trencher and, with a mighty kick, sent the blind man flying into the middle of the chamber beyond.
Kratos took care to look only at the ceiling. Jurr had not lied—he had not even come close to telling the full story. Mirrors paneled the walls. Even more mirrors stretched from side to side along the ceiling. The mirrors there showed the blind man plowing straight into the hideous monster. Before either of them had a chance to react, the snakes that were Medusa’s hair instantly unbraided themselves and struck at the blind man as one, latching on to his entire body and chewing on him as the water snake had chewed on Kratos’s greave. The snakes writhed as the blind man went into convulsions and they clamped him to Medusa’s face. Gut churning at the reflected sight, Kratos decided he didn’t need the rest of his plan.
Three quick steps sent him past the dying man and the Gorgon, who shrieked in rage as she tried to claw the hapless slave from her face. Just as she finally succeeded in pushing him away, her head lifted and, in the mirrored wall, she saw her death standing at her back. Kratos sprang into the air, striking downward with both feet and driving the monster face-first to the chamber floor. At the same instant, the Blades of Chaos flashed in a converging slash that sheared through both collarbones and the back of her upper ribs.
Kratos released the blades and reached down into the wound with both hands. Driving his fingers into the slimy mess of Gorgon tissue, he caught hold of her spine and with one mighty wrench ripped her head from her body. Her head snakes struck at his arm, but weakly; their venom had been expended on the blind man.
He paused for a moment, regarding the reflection of her deadly gaze in the mirror: those fearsome eyes, the tusklike fangs, hair of living snakes.
KRATOS ARCHED HIS BACK as the feeling of sudden upward movement seized him once more. From the dim, moss-lit subte
rranean chambers he was transported to a place of dazzling, brilliant white.
“You have done well, my Spartan.”
I’m not your Spartan, he thought, but he said only, “Lady Aphrodite?”
He used his free hand to shade his eyes against the glare and then could barely make out the diaphanous house silks that clung invitingly to the goddess’s body. She took the severed head from his hands, holding it by its now-dead hair snakes.
“Lady Aphrodite, are you finished with me?”
“Oh, yes—one last thing now that I have made certain you have completed your mission for me. Here,” she said, holding out Medusa’s severed head, its face carefully turned away. “Take it by the snakes. That’s right. Careful you don’t look into its eyes yourself. Now, sling it back over your shoulder as if you were putting away one of those impressively large swords you wear on your back.”
Kratos did so and felt the snakes evaporate from his grasp. “What happened? Where did it go?”
“It will be there when you want it. Just reach back for it, and it will be in your hand, turned the right way and ready to petrify.”
“How does that work?”
“It’s magic. One more thing you should know: Being dead diminishes Medusa’s power.”
“People won’t turn to stone?”
“Oh, they will. They just won’t stay that way for very long.”
Kratos stared directly at Aphrodite, waiting for the full explanation.
“Ten seconds from a full blast from the eyes. And whatever you do, don’t lose it.” Aphrodite spread her hands and regarded him closely. “Athena wants it when you’re done. She has some use for it. Something about a shield … maybe a cloak? Well, no matter. You have destroyed the Queen of the Gorgons, and now her power is yours!”
In an instant she towered above him like a mountain, as though her hair might brush the moon, and her voice rang like a great bronze bell. “Freeze and destroy them all with Medusa’s Gaze!” the goddess thundered. “Go with the gods, Kratos. Go forth in the name of Olympus!”
Before he could draw breath to reply, he was in Athens once more. Ares still towered above the Acropolis, casting house-size gobbets of Greek fire on every side.
When Kratos recovered his bearings, he found himself once more in the quieter neighborhood from which the goddess had taken him. He was still on the far side of the Acropolis from Athena’s temple—and from her oracle.
He put his head down and ran. Ran like the lion in pursuit of a lamb, swift as a falcon, tireless as the wind. He had to run. So much time had been wasted, and for what? A power he didn’t need. A power that had nothing to do with finding the Oracle, nor with defeating the God of War. If Aphrodite had really wanted to help him, she would have set him down at the door of Athena’s temple and put the Oracle in his lap.
Gods and their games. He was sick of all of them. Once he killed Ares, he would be done with them and their insane demands.
And the nightmares would be banished from his sleep, from his every waking instant. Forever.
NINE
SMOKE ROLLED DOWN from the heights of the Acropolis, a black greasy pall that smothered the Parthenon on the mountainside and came near to strangling Kratos. The tough armor he’d taken from the undead legionnaires shielded him from the killing heat of the flames and protected his Ares-burned back, but it couldn’t help him breathe. Choking, gasping for air, he had to turn back and seek a clearer way toward the summit.
None of the war god’s fireballs had yet touched this particular neighborhood, but the area had not escaped the attentions of Ares’s legions. There were bands of roving monsters of all descriptions: combinations of Minotaurs and Centaurs for cavalry, Cyclopes for heavy infantry, skeleton archers, legionnaires, harpies, wraiths … and what was that?
The creatures looked like hideous women with a single long snake’s tail instead of legs. Writhing serpents crowned their heads, and crackling green beams of power poured out from heir eyes….
It seemed that the death of their queen had brought the rest of the Gorgons into the fight.
But … all of Greece knew there had been only three Gorgons: Stheno, Euryale, and of course the recently deceased Medusa. Yet Kratos saw a dozen of the repulsive creatures, and he had no doubt that others were spreading through the city at that very instant. Killing them would feed his anger and give him momentary distraction from the ever-present nightmare fluttering at the edge of his mind, but that would be only a waste of time that he and the Oracle could not spare. A permanent solution to his visions awaited. He hunted for a clear path to Athena’s oracle.
Kratos ducked into an alley and scrambled up a rain barrel, from which he could swing himself onto a balcony and clamber up another story or two to the roof.
Athens burned.
Save only the neighborhood around him, the entire city was in flames. Now and then he caught sight of the Long Walls through the smoke. The flash of firelight off brandished weapons told him that soldiers still wasted their lives in a futile attempt to hold a wall that no longer defended the city. Everybody had to die somewhere; if defending their useless wall gave them the illusion of dying for a noble cause, who was he to gainsay their futile heroism? Men had died under his slashing blades for less.
Kratos progressed slowly across the rooftop, scouting for a path to follow uphill. He moved with caution, to avoid attracting the attention of the harpies that swooped hither and thither through the smoke. The old man at the gates had said the Oracle’s chamber was on the east side of the Parthenon. Across the face of the Acropolis, he could pick out faint brown tendrils that might be footpaths, but the billowing smoke clouded them and hid other avenues entirely.
When he moved to the edge of the roof to get a better view, an arrow sang past his ear. Kratos fell flat and let more arrows sail over him. He chanced a quick look over the edge of the roof and located a handful of undead archers who’d taken a nearby balcony for their vantage point. Kratos saw a man venture into the street, only to take an arrow through the belly, and when the arrow detonated, the blast of flame splattered the man’s guts across the front of his own house. The archers held fire only when they could find no further targets.
Kratos ducked when a new ball of Greek fire exploded a quarter mile away, roughly where he thought the road leading to the summit of the Acropolis might turn upward. A grim picture painted itself within his mind.
Athena’s worshippers would naturally run for the Parthenon when they found their city under attack by the God of War. Ares had sown fire across the whole city, sparing only this quarter, through which ran the road up the Acropolis—which would naturally draw those worshippers like flies to turds. Then the god had his monsters patrolling the streets, preventing further movement.
Kratos understood: The God of War was deliberately funneling the most pious and devoted of Athena’s flock into one small area of the city—making it look as if this was the safest area, as well as the only route to the temple of their goddess. Instead of fleeing into the countryside, where tracking them down and slaughtering them would be a daunting task even for Ares’s minions, they were packing themselves into the illusory safety of this single neighborhood.
Concentrating where they could most easily be destroyed. All at once. No fuss. No mess. No chasing people through the forest or rooting them out of mountain caves. The citizens of Athens had made of themselves nothing more than cattle rushing to the slaughterhouse floor. It was brutal, and he knew it would be very effective.
He’d done this sort of thing himself.
Kratos grabbed his temples to keep his head from exploding as an image burned hotter than the sun through his brain.
No! It couldn’t be … The dead, those he had slaughtered in Athena’s temple … Guilty! He had killed—
Gasping, Kratos forced the horrible vision away. It seized him more powerfully each time, but giving in to the horror wasn’t going to make reaching the Parthenon any easier. He could conquer his own nightmar
es—for a short while—but it seemed the monsters were gathering on the streets below to block his path. And he knew those undead archers hadn’t forgotten he was up here. He had to move. Fast.
On the other hand, he saw no reason to surrender the high ground.
Three strides for momentum took him to the lip of the roof, and a mighty leap sent him hurtling over the street to the opposite roof. The skeleton archers below were so startled, none of them got off a shot. As he sprinted along, he heard the commanding bellow of a Minotaur, and he knew he’d been seen by the forces below.
His next jump drew a scatter of fire arrows, though none came close—and he could see undead legionnaires mounted on the backs of Centaurs racing parallel to his path on the streets below. Another rooftop and another leap, and harpies began to swoop and dive at him. He dodged and ducked across roof after roof without slowing, using the blades as grapnels to swing himself over gaps too wide to bridge, and whirling them about his head as he ran to keep the harpies at bay.
He sprinted from roof to roof, running faster than the harpies could pursue—but the shouts and bellows of the monsters below came even faster. Not even Kratos could outrun the speed of sound. More of Ares’s creatures streamed toward him, and he leaped from the last house of the neighborhood and dived once again into the fires and smoke of the rest of the city.
One Minotaur had the bright idea of calling for all Cyclopes, Centaurs, and other Minotaurs to forget about trying to catch the racing Spartan; instead, they should batter the walls of the burning buildings, weakening every structure in Kratos’s path.
Battling the strangling smoke and roasting flames, Kratos jumped to a rooftop which collapsed under his weight. A frantic scrabble at the structure beneath the splintered roof tiles and a swift overhead whip of a Blade of Chaos, which embedded it in a more-solid rooftop ahead, gained him enough purchase to keep aloft. A quick glance below at the countless enemies of all descriptions crowding there told him in no uncertain terms the outcome of an unlucky fall.
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